


A City That Shouldn't Exist (And Definitely Doesn't Exist)

by buttpatrol



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: A slight AU, Dialogue Heavy, Emmanuel is bad at feelings, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, I have a lot of feelings about Lem King, M/M, Now even more AU that we know the curse of Nacre is maybe not broken, pattern magic, so very very unbeta'd, spoilers for the end of boat party
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-01
Updated: 2016-12-01
Packaged: 2018-09-03 13:55:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8716486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buttpatrol/pseuds/buttpatrol
Summary: Emmanuel doesn’t know what he is even doing here. He still has flour on his shirt cuffs, and he is afraid of raising his sword too high in case he accidently jabs someone from his own crew with it.Then he sees him. Tall for a man, but a little short for an Orc, with a rather wide friendly expression for an invading marauder. Their eyes meet, and the Orc gave a polite shrug as if to say, ‘What are we doing here even?”Emmanuel is sure he doesn’t know.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Hello. This is a in a slight AU where there was more time to prepare for the court case, and thus it took a whole week for the Boat Part to mess up Nacre, as opposed to 72 hours.

He meets Lem King on a bright day where the water reflected off the water so brightly that it hurt his eyes as he  had stumbled up from below deck, sword in hand, uncertain.  It was chaos up here, the Kingdom Come’s deck slick with the spray of salt water and blood. Men and ghosts, and undead bodies bump into each other, and here and there whispers of “Angelo Triste, the Prince, the Prince!”

Emmanuel doesn’t know what he is even doing here. He still has flour on his shirt cuffs, and he is afraid of raising his sword too high in case he accidently jabs someone from his own crew with it.

Then he sees him. Tall for a man, but a little short for an Orc, with a rather wide friendly expression for an invading marauder. Their eyes meet, and the Orc gave a polite shrug as if to say, ‘What are we doing here even?”

Emmanuel is sure he doesn’t know.

 

* * *

 

“We are really just a legend? A bed time story to put children to sleep?”

“Oh yes,” Lem nods enthusiastically, “We have a good collection of stories about the lost city of scholars from various cultures. Even a few short songs. It was thought that you all, erm, well, died with the rest during the erasure. That you had been lost.”

This is hard for Emmanuel to wrap his head around. “Songs?”

“Yes.”

“Could…could you sing one?”

Lem looks bashfully down at the counter between them, where the square of pastry Emmanuel had started earlier lay untouched. “I am afraid I am not much of a singer as musicians go. Fero sings more than I do.  There is one from my own people’s records from that time. There is a lot of unmarked grave and bone white spires imagery—Old Orchish was rather… visceral.”

Lem clears his throat and sang a couple of notes in a language Emmanuel didn’t know. Heavy with long vowels, consonants rolling smoothly into each other. Lem’s voice was almost too soft and mild, sounding almost absent minded, like a song half sung to oneself when you think no one is listening. It’s almost painfully innocent, and Emmanuel impulsively wished that he was close enough to touch Lem’s face.

“Something like that, anyway.” Lem says self-consciously, “It’s not like the song I played at the hotel. There is no magic to it.”

Emmanuel is not so sure of that, but presses on. “With your magic violin?”

Lem smiles, “Not magic, just very expensive, and very very good. The magic is in the song. Well, the order of the notes. Do you know anything about semiotics?”

Emmanuel shakes his head.

“It’s has to do with the names and the order of things. The meaning associated with symbols. Here-“

Lem dug a small white circle out of his pocket and placed it in Emmanuel’s palm.

“It’s a bit of bone?” Emmanuel guessed?

“Here, it is a bit of bone, something to be thrown away or fed to your dog. In Vellas, north of here this money. Enough to buy you a drink and a piece of bread at most places in the Fish district. It gives it a different feel doesn’t it? It hasn’t changed physically, but it changed into something else just by adding a bit of knowledge. People are funny, we attach meaning to things all the time. Days of the week, and lives of a court case. Blue for sadness, red for anger, and for love. Change the meaning…”

Emmanuel hands the coin back, and began to roll out the dough for croissants again, “Change the world?”

Lem gave a short laugh, “Well, change it a little and hope that the outcome is pushed in my favor.”

“How’s that be working out for you, so far?” Emmanuel asks wryly.

Lem buries his face in hands, laughing, “Yes, well. It’s been an imperfect science.”

“So you need the violin change the meaning of situations?”

“Yes. _Well._ Sort of.  I’ve managed it by whistling when I was in a bit of a pickle. But others do it by painting, or weaving, or dancing, or map making. It’s a complex field. I bet one could do it with baking.”

Emmanuel looking at the lump of dough again. “Are you serious?”

“I don’t see why not. It is almost ritualistic right? The ingredients in their proper order, shaped and flattened and then adding the butter.”

He snorted, “It’s not an art, not like--.”

“I think it is. There is a beauty to it.” Lem says with disquieting earnestness.

Emmanuel looks at him.  “Who are you even? Like really?”

“A really bad adventurer?  I thought, going out into the wide world… I thought it would be easier than this.” He hid a smile behind a hand, “It was worth it though.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Nacre is _fantastic_. I am an archivist, I deal in stories. And I took it for granted that this city’s story was over. But it’s alive. _Well,_ _sort of_. In its own way. And I _am_ glad. I am glad I met Nacre.”

Emmanuel feels heat rise to his cheeks, “Well Nacre is glad it met you.”

There is a long silence.

 _Don’t kiss him_ , Emmanuel thinks.

The low light from the white streets glows behind Lem. There is a long silence, and there is eye-contact and the Lem-ness of him, and the way he stands, and the strange beauty of his music, and that time he said he stay _forever,_ and that then Emmanuel had said that he would leave with Lem.

 _Don’t kiss him_. Tristero, he has only known this man a handful of days. Time is long and unhurried here, no one falls for a stranger this fast.

“I should go. The historiography of Narcre court cases isn’t going to read itself,” Lem says with forced cheeriness, “Who knows, I might even sleep.”

_Absolutely don’t kiss him Emmanuel DeSalle. Hold tight to whatever scrape of self-preservation you have left._

“I will walk you back to the main thoroughfare,” Emmanuel says, shrugging off his apron.

“Thank you,” Lem smiles. Emmanuel looks away.

The night is warm and the streets are mostly empty. There is music drifting out some distant window. They walk in step, Emmanuel politely pointing out the different shops and stores for Lem.  Emmanuel can feel his heart beat uncomfortably loud in his chest, feeling somehow hollow and full to bursting at the same time.

“Well, I guess this is me,” Lem says.

 _Don’t kiss him_.

Emmanuel nods, “Good luck with the studying.”

“Thanks,”

Emmanuel turns and walks away. Back towards his warm empty shop, where he will bake bread until daylight when his assistant comes to help open the shop. And Lem will be back in the library, surrounded by books while he try to think his way out of an impossible situation.

The rain had stopped. He hadn’t noticed earlier.

He turns around.

Lem is right where he left him, because _of course he is. Tourist._  Looking up at the white towers, bright against the night sky.

 “Lem-“

“Emmanuel?”

“What are-“

“Are you-“

Emmanuel decides that this isn’t really working and opts to push Lem towards one of the alleyways.

“Um,” Lem says nervously, “What exactly is happening?”

Emanuel pushes him back against the brick. Lem has a good four inches on him, so he has to stand on his tip toes to—but actually its fine because _Lem leans down to him and—_ there is heat and kissing, and a hand tangled in his hair.

He is making out with a man he just met, in some drippy back alley, in front of Tristero on a work day.

The break apart,

“My shop-- upstairs“

“Yes”

“This way.”

He takes Lem’s hand in his own. This is a lot. It is hard not just start kissing him again. _Am I possessed? Have I finally lost it?_ He feels giddy, like he is in some clandestine affair back in school again.

It takes too long to unlock the door, and he can feel Lem looking at him. It finally clicks open. He almost take Lem’s hand again but it somehow feels too needy and foolish, so he just leads the way up the back staircase.

Emmanuel normally doesn’t think amount his bed. It just somewhere to sleep after a long evening of baking, or after a journey on the Kingdom Come. He hardly looks at it. It now suddenly seem ominous and the dominant feature of the room. It’s unmade, and there is a dusting of flour in corner in the vague shape of a hand,

“I am sorry that it’s…” he trails off, his face red.

“It’s fine.” Lem says, and Emmanuel is being gently pushed back onto the bed. “We’re fine. We’re fine.”

 

 

Later, when the candlelight has burned low, and Lem has fallen asleep, gangly and half wrapped around him, Emmanuel looks out the window.  

Love is funny here. No one life is ever cut short before their time. No tragic lovers torn apart too soon. Love is long, and lazy and can last forever. But sometimes that made it messy. Living forever in a city you can’t leave makes for some awkward encounters with exes. Also because bodies age but ghosts don’t that had been some nasty incidents with lovers who what to preserve themselves, young and beautiful forever. That’s the price of living here.

Lem will now also never die. He had agreed to be a citizen of Nacre, instantly.

Emmanuel is not sure if that makes him happy or not. Still, he thinks of how easily it could have been different, how easily Lem could have died before he even met Emmanuel, and shivers a little.

Lem tightens an arm around his waist.

* * *

 

 

The sun is bright and hot, and the air is clear.  Emmanuel DeSalle stands in the broken remains of what used to be the hotel waiting to meet a man. A breeze blows in from the sea. His arm still hurts, bruised when a shelf of bread had tipped over during the attack. 

Injuries hurt more now. Yesterday he had nearly be hit by a cart rushing supplies to the districts that had been closest to the sea, and it had been terrifying. He had never been so scared of death before.

Death is everywhere now. You can smell bodies in the streets and floating in the harbour. The undead have started take on the scent of decay, and the ghosts are becoming thinner and more translucent every day.  

Ventaro Docce has finally arrived.

“Ah, Emmanuel right? You gave the verdict for the people at Hella Veral’s trial.”

His stomach churned uncomfortably, “Yes. I am sorry. I never should have—“

“Its fine.” Ventaro waved his hand dismissively, “Hella certainly is not free of fault, but I think that is clear to everyone that the Royal family had some stake in this. And myself as well. How foolish we were.”

“Still, I wasn’t unbiased, I trusted—“ Emmanuel can’t even say it.

“You trusted Lem.” Ventaro sighed, “He didn’t want this. He was at the library, when they killed her”

Emmanuel flinches, “They were only here a few days, and they ruined everything.”

“Yes, I suppose they did,” Ventaro looked towards the blue of the sea, the view now unobstructed by buildings. “They set the things back in motion that had remained static sense the erasure. In a way we are just… catching up to the rest of the world.”

He turned to Emmanuel again, “Will you return to your shop?”

“I guess,” Emmanuel shrugged. “It’s mostly intact, though I don’t know that there is much of a market for pastries anymore.”

“Hrmm,”  the old man murmured agreeably, “Well, I supposed we should get to the reason I asked you to meet me here. An item has recently made its way back into my possession.”

He produced a slightly muddied, worn book from his pocket.

“Poetry?” Emmanuel asks, confused.

“I gave it him. He must have lost it during the attack. You might find something helpful to you in it. Give it back to him when you see him.”

“I’m not going to—“ Emmanuel protested.

“Yes you are. When you are ready. I’d go myself but I am old, even for a ghost, and this new world is not mean for me. Be careful, he has gotten himself into some trouble again.”

Emmanuel lets out a shaky breath, that is somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “Tristero, he is always in trouble. He agrees to the stupidest things.”

“Good luck,” Ventaro says kindly.

Emmanuel walks uptown to where the gardens and zoo used to be. There is still a few benches that are usable. He thumbs through the book until he reaches the back pages where the careful print ends and the final poems is written in a spidery scrawl.

_The differences between the rain on these old terracottas_

_And the wind on these painted shutters_

By the time he finishes his eyes burn with tears, and he tilts his head back towards the sky. Overheat the Panthers are flying North West, into the cold breeze blowing from Vellas.

He fishes a nub of a pencil from his pocket, and begins to write.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I am in pain about Nacre, send help.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [the best by far is you](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8719843) by [madelinestarr](https://archiveofourown.org/users/madelinestarr/pseuds/madelinestarr)




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